Renee Lapham Collins: Ghosts of Christmas past

Thursday

Dec 20, 2012 at 12:14 PMDec 20, 2012 at 12:16 PM

By Renee Lapham Collins

This story originally appeared in the Holiday 2012 edition of Lenawee magazine.

The ghosts of Christmases past haunt me regularly as the calendar winds down from autumn to the holiday season. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ timeless classic, the ghost of my memory shows me happy times: family dinners, birthday cakes for Baby Jesus and a state of sustained chaos starting around 4 o’clock Christmas morning and lasting throughout the day.

I come from a family of eight children: six girls born between 1958 and 1967 and then two boys born between 1972 and 1977. Christmas always was a very noisy, disorganized and generally satisfying holiday — my favorite time of the year for much of my life.

But the ghost of Christmas past also brings visions of sad times, like the first Christmas without my sister Carol, who died Dec. 19, 2002. We buried her Dec. 21 and on Christmas Day, we all had to figure out this new family dynamic, which included her 9-year-old twin daughters. We overspent that year, trying to rub a balm of gift-giving over the wound left by her passing.

For me, the melancholy of the holiday is not because she is gone but that I wished my days with her away as if they were dandelion seeds launched by my breath and carried away on the summer wind. I know I’ll never get them back.

My sister loved Christmas. She loved shopping, choosing presents for her daughters, getting gifts, being with family. She probably loved being with me more than I loved being with her. I was rather a mean sister at times.

But I’ve learned that Christmas is all about second chances, the opportunity each year to leave the ghost of Christmas past behind and let the healing power of Christmas present drive away the sadness.

Years ago, when I was a 19-year-old college student working at my summer job in Tecumseh, I remember complaining to a regular customer about the long, hot summer.

“I wish it was over and I could go back to school,” I said.

“Don’t be wishing your life away,” said the customer. “It’ll be over soon enough.”

Looking back, I wonder how many years I’ve wished away already. I picture a giant hourglass, like the one from “The Wizard of Oz” or the opening credits of “Days of Our Lives” and I think of how quickly the grains of sand tumble through the stem of the glass and spill to the bottom. Thirty-five years — blink of an eye.

This year, Dec. 25 will arrive, carried on the scent of pine roping and snow and cinnamon and the sight of gold and silver ribbons dangling from gift bags stacked under the tree. Slowly, it is once more becoming my favorite time of the year. The spirit of Christmas remains — the reason for the season, as some are fond of saying. This year, I resolve to slow the falling sand by not allowing myself to wish away a single moment. Good or bad, all of our moments have purpose. They also have the power to shape our hearts, to make us better, kinder, more loving. I know the Christmas of my childhood is gone and my sister, too, but the memories each Christmas remind me to wish for world peace instead of tomorrow.

Renee Lapham Collins is an assistant professor of journalism at Adrian College.